Ex-college football player claims concussions ruined his life

Adrian Arrington was a defensive fixture at Eastern Illinois University, until several hard hits to the head sidelined him forever

January 04, 2013|By John Keilman, Chicago Tribune reporter

But Siprut, Arrington's attorney, said that's not good enough. He wants the NCAA to create a "bright line rule" to govern when players are taken off the field and when they're allowed to return. Letting schools write their own rules could allow a coach to endanger his athletes' health, he said.

"You have to take discretion away from the coaches, not because they're bad people, but because … they're forced to make split-second judgment calls and they're not trained medical professionals," he said.

The NCAA has responded in court papers that each school is responsible for protecting the health of its players, and that athletes sign forms in which they acknowledge the risk of concussions. Spokesman Christopher Radford said the organization advises teams on the best practices of managing the injury.

"The NCAA has great compassion for student athletes who are injured as a result of training, practice or competition, which fuels our desire to make student athlete safety our top priority," he said.

Siprut is seeking unspecified financial damages, as well as the establishment of an NCAA trust fund to pay for the medical monitoring of all former athletes who suffered concussions. He also wants the NCAA to eliminate "the coaching of tackling methodologies that cause head injuries."

But Christopher Randolph, a neurology professor at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, said it's not clear that any of those proposals would have much benefit. That's because for all of the recent attention on the supposed effects of sports-related concussions, little has been proved definitively, he said.

"As we sit here today, we don't know that having multiple concussions playing football will cause you any problems later in life," said Randolph, who has published several scientific papers on the subject. "We're speculating about that."

Arrington has no doubt that concussions are behind his long list of maladies, which include foggy memory, crippling migraines and seizures so intense that his shoulder pops out of its socket. His doctors have yet to devise an effective treatment plan, he said, and until he recently got on his girlfriend's insurance, he sometimes had to go without expensive medication.

The conditions have prevented him from holding a job, he said.

"I started working at a Boys and Girls Club in the summer, but due to having seizures, not being able to drive a car, being a liability working with kids, I couldn't do that job anymore," he said.

He has had legal trouble, too. Siprut said Arrington used to drink to cope with his headaches, and police reports show that in May 2011, Arrington was arrested outside a Bloomington bar for allegedly beating up a bouncer. He pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and was sentenced to two years of probation, according to court records.

Arrington no longer consumes alcohol, Siprut said.

Noel Lucero, Arrington's girlfriend and the mother of two of the three young children they're raising together, said while his physical problems are harrowing, the emotional ones are worse.

"It's been getting him really down," she said. "I can see the wear and tear it's taking on his mind, trying to keep it together. He tells me it takes him every ounce of his strength just to act normally. If he acted the way he really felt, he'd just be curled up in a ball."

Lucero said she now hates football, but Arrington still watches it every weekend. He doesn't want to destroy the game with his lawsuit, he said — he wants to make it safer, correcting what he sees as a fundamental hypocrisy.

"The whole thing about college football, they say they are the people who guide young men's lives," he said. "What does the young person do when he gets an injury to his brain? What was your point of going to college if you can't think for yourself?"